Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound: "What Thou Lovest Well..."

254 The Last Ten Years
Ateneo Veneto; in June, the Verdi Requiem at La Fenice conducted by
Thomas Schippers. The house in Dorsoduro had a revolving door for
Pound scholars. Leon Edel, biographer of Henry James, got high marks
for ‘‘very good conversation,’’ but added to her labors. As an example of
the di≈culty of caring for Ezra in his last years, she noted: ‘‘When interested,
he [Ezra] forgets his preoccupation with the ‘water works’ . . .
changed linen three times, with maximum hysterical comment to drive
one mad! But if I stop, it means getting into the hands of paid help.’’
Olga was ruthless in discouraging unwanted visitors. D. D. Paige invited
himself to Venice in June, bringing his second wife and young child
of five. They would stay at the Pensione Seguso, and wanted to meet
Pound again. Olga turned them away without a thought. Time was too
short. On one of the rare cool days of summer, Olga read to Ezra from a
book about Kierkegaard. ‘‘Slow reading does not seem to tire him. [I]
forget how slowly he always read to himself.’’ When Ezra felt up to it, they
traveled to Lucca to visit Enrico Pea, the poet whose work Olga had
translated, who resembled ‘‘a jovial Santa Claus.’’
Another controversy as divisive as the one over the Bollingen erupted
in 1972 when the nominating committee of the Academy of Arts and
Sciences in Boston awarded Pound the Emerson-Thoreau Medal, and the
council of the Academy overruled it. According to James Laughlin, a close
observer, ‘‘the pot continued to boil . . . in a way very favorable to Ezra,
and there have been a great many letters to the editor in various newspapers,
even editorials.’’
Dr. O. B. Hardison, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington,
a member of the Academy, resigned in protest over the council’s
decision. He invited Ezra and Olga to Washington for a reading at the
Library. They were in Friuli with the Ivanciches when the letter came, and
failed to reply. Dorothy Pound (writing from Calford Green, Haverhill,
Su√olk) heard the news and urged them not to go; the trip would be too
hard on Ezra. ‘‘Omar has ‘parked’ me in a nursing home about twenty
miles away,’’ she wrote, ‘‘an extra person in the house was too much for
Elizabeth. The personnel [are] very thoughtful; clients, about ten or
twelve, not given to being pleasant . . . lovely grounds, one can walk on